Where to start with a records and information strategy

There are 50 places you COULD start.

Personally, I'd start with the perception your organisation has of what records and information management is.

This is because a lot of our ability to succeed in an organisation, is in our ability to perform to people's expectations.

If (for instance) you've just started in a new organisation, and that organisation's expectation is that "records is just the paper" - trying to work outside of that is going to violate the expectation the organisation has of how you will perform in your role. This creates authority conflict (ie. conflict about what your role authorises you to do in the social system), and forces people to start to make sense of your role again, and also their role in the context of your changed role. That sounds complex - and it is, it's also , something that people are not fond of doing, particularly when they're surprised about it, and don't get a choice.

While taking your past experience of your role into a new organisation, and using your expertise to deliver similar things might seem like the only way to go, there is a good chance that it does you more harm than good.

If you want an analogy of violated social expectations, think of a how people in a conservative social group would respond to a married person who gets drunk and engages in flirtatious behaviour with someone else's spouse. You're probably picturing lots of scorn, public and private rebukes, lots of awkwardness and embarrassment, probably quite a bit of gossip, maybe even some real conflict - and a reordering of social standing with the person violating the social expectations now decidedly lower in the hierarchy.

This is because the person has engaged in socially inappropriate behavior.

They have a role to play in the social system - and they've played out of it, and people like the roles - they've likely built their entire lives around knowing where they fit in the system.

When you confuse them about where they fit, they respond by trying very hard to reinforce the current set of social norms.

Organisations respond in much the same way - they are social systems, with social expectations of the roles that people will play. This is why job descriptions often aren't worth the electronic paper equivalent that they're written on - they're a fantasy about what the organisation would like the role to be if not for all of the already entrenched social expectations (politics).

This is a long winded way of saying, that the place to start a strategy is with current expectations.

It's only once you understand the social expectations of the role, that you actually understand the boundaries that your strategy needs to start within.

Anywhere that you'd like to operate outside of these boundaries, you need to engage in what some might call "the art of the possible" - which really means a set of conversations (or some other method) of asking people whether they'd accept a wider (or narrower) scope of the role, and a different place in the social system.

You also need to be clear on the effort that you're going to ask for in expanding the scope, because many will support an expansion of a role if it comes with benefits and no costs.

If it comes with costs, they're going to engage in a completely different calculation.

Take the move from records systems as things interacted with only by professionals, to systems with users.

When I talk to people who went through it, they talk about how people in records thought that was a great idea - it sounded like it would solve a whole heap of logistical problems created by electronic documents.

What it did though, was force a whole heap of work into other areas of the organisation - work that required them to change their practices, and that they didn't feel they gained a benefit from - so they didn't do it.

It was a narrowing of the role of records that was good in principle, but no one talked about the added costs to business units that now were expected to engage in activity that had traditionally been done by another team.

After that, I'd move on to problems we can solve.

Where would you start?

Where would you go next?